I originally had a nice long post here detailing all problems, but it apparently got lost in the internet. Didn't know where else to put this so I put this here.

When booting from my hard drive, GRUB doesn't load Linux. It does load Windows. It also loads Linux when I boot from a Live CD. This happened with every distro I've tried.

I used to get a loading message that never actually loaded anything when I tried to boot Linux. Then I got error 17. Now I finally got Kanotix to get farther than those before. I see stuff like:
root = whatever
blah blah
initrd = something/somethingelse

But it stops at initrd. My cursor just sits there, blinking, with my hard drive "access" light staying on, but nothing happening over the course of 2 minutes.

I KNOW I can boot from hard drive. A little while ago I was having moniter problems. I would occasionally get "NO SIGNAL" and I'd have to switch the video input from Radeon to my integrated. While I was doing this once I accidentally let Ubuntu run, and it actually booted up. I forgot root password though lol. I don't remember whether I had my video card on or integrated; it just goes to show it CAN be done under certain circumstances (like when I don't need it to). EDIT: That was my old moniter, which used VGA, and I've gotten a new once since then which works fine and uses DVI.

I have another small problem that is annoying but this one is a higher priority for me, thanks.

If you guys need any more information just ask for it, I'm in a hurry since I need to be in bed soon, semester starts tomorrow. Sorry if I seem to be asking for too much or rushing. Thanks in advance, everyone.

And it just stops booting there, with my text cursor flashing still, and my hard drive light on. I took out the splash and quiet options which brought the same results. I even left it like this for about 5 minutes on that screen; nothing happened.

It may have been because of all the Linux distros I've put this through, maybe about 5 or more HDD installs. Then again, everything was mostly working until I got that new processor and motherboard, then Linux quit booting.

On a related note, every few months or so, I'll start up my PC and there's a much longer startup beep. About 4x as long. Then everything boots up really slow, my processor speed is shown as rediculously low, and my OS would give me hard drive error messages. This is a rare occurance though, and usually I just reboot and it's all fine.

I tried to boot from that "Super Grub Disk", but it couldn't even begin to boot it because the kernel had a different name than vmlinuz, and I didn't know enough about the Disk to figure out how to use custom names etc etc. So basically I'll have to lern me sum Grub.

Thanks.

Kano

Titel: GRUB doesn Verfasst am: 07.01.2008, 23:30 Uhr

Anmeldung: 17. Dez 2003
Beiträge: 16613

I guess something is loaded by initrams which takes more time than a standard cd boot - there the initrd is created differently but you could only try to boot without splash and quiet option (you can easyly edit the options) to see where it stops.

CollisionChaos

Titel: GRUB doesn Verfasst am: 08.01.2008, 04:14 Uhr

Anmeldung: 27. Okt 2005
Beiträge: 4

I think I've figured it out, I booted from the Super Grub Disk and this time just chose the "Boot Gnu/Linux" instead of the "Boot Gnu/Linux directly" option, and everything booted fine. Yeah, I think my hard drive is almost kaputt.

OK, onto the less critical but still annoying issue: when I set my resolution to 1680x1050 with your control center applet, it works fine and I get my nice high resolution fine. But the problem is, I get blinking. These "blinks" last about 1 second and happen randomly, about one per 5-10 seconds, sometimes more. When these blinks happen my screen goes totally black for about one second, then comes back. It is very annoying. This problem doesn't happen when my resolution is set to, for example, 1024x768. What should I do? Should I install the official ATI drivers? Do you still have some special driver-installing script I should run, or should I just follow the website instructions? Should I edit my xorg config? I'm confused. I swear, ATI will be the death of me one day.

Thanks for the help and quick responces, I appreciate it.

Kano

Titel: GRUB doesn Verfasst am: 08.01.2008, 10:00 Uhr

Anmeldung: 17. Dez 2003
Beiträge: 16613

try

update-scripts-kanotix.sh
install-fglrx-debian.sh -v 7-11

CollisionChaos

Titel: GRUB doesn Verfasst am: 09.01.2008, 02:27 Uhr

Anmeldung: 27. Okt 2005
Beiträge: 4

That worked flawlessly. Thank you! Everything seems to be working fine now, didn't ever think I'd have this working. Can't wait to see the bugs that KDE 4 brings.